Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Coptic Digital Resources

[N.B. I am now keeping this list up-to-date on my personal website (here). Unfortunately, Blogger did not allow me to edit this list for several months, so I had to make the move.]

Coptic is the final phase of the Ancient Egyptian language which began in the 3rd century.After the Muslim conquest of 642, Sahidic Coptic becomes the nationalistic and religious language of native Egyptians.Several other regional dialects are prominent (Fayumic, Akhmimic, Sub-Akhmimic, Middle Egyptian, etc...).By the 9th century, Coptic is replaced in the documentary papyri by Egypt.Bohairic Coptic (the dialect of the Nile Delta) becomes prominent as the medieval language of Monastic Egypt and is still present in some parts of Coptic Christian liturgy today. Coptic was one of the first languages into which the Greek New Testament was translated.

Listed below are the main internet resources for the Coptic language.If anybody else knows of good ones, please post them and I will update this list.

I have found some minor errors in the Sahidic, but this is largely very reliable and based on the current scholarly editions.

Sahidic New Testament and Nag Hammadi, PHI CD # 7 (free)

. For scholars only! The search engine for this can cost a ton. I have found that

Diogenes works very well and is free. The only problem is that Coptic unicode is still in development, so the Greek letters show up in standard unicode Greek. Email the Packhard Humanities Institute (phi [!at!] packhum.org) for more information.

12 comments
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Logos Sahidica site:"Lastly, while English is related to Latin, in some important respects it is quite similar to the Sahidic. Where Greek has the definite article (the) but no indefinite article (a, an) and Latin and Syriac have no articles at all, Sahidic has both the definite and indefinite articles. Moreover, Sahidic article usage is quite similar to English."

Unlike in earlier dialects of Aramaic, the final aleph in Syriac has simply become part of the noun, and if you want to show definiteness you need to add a following pronoun. See paragraph 70 in Noldeke's Syriac Grammar.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm still in the learning stages and enjoy reading this blog. -Jq

It is good to see that the Coptic versions are no longer the forgotten "stepchild" of New Testament studies. As Stanley E. Porter said in Handbook to Exegesis of the New Testament, pp. 67, 68, "The earliest translations were the Latin, Syriac and Coptic versions (though not necessarily in that order), and they retain the greatest importance....The ancient versions are significant in the search for the most likely original Greek text, especially the three earliest ones, Coptic, Syriac and Latin."

Just a correction. The sahidica website can always be found using the www.sahidica.org url. I had to move it to a different location when I lost the integlogic.com url. Bohairica 1.0 is now on the site and plans for Sahidica 2.0 are there also.